Principal Data Scientist

Brief Role Description

This position is Career Level 30P Home Based with a Role Classification of Fully Remote.

Role Summary

The role resides within VWFS’s Data Science & AI CoE team and focuses on end-to-end model development. It requires a proven track record of successful model development and quantifiable business impact. It is not primarily a data analytics or ML engineering role. 

The Principal Data Scientist will lead high-impact initiatives that directly contribute to VWFS’s stated goal to become a data and AI-driven organization. Potential projects cover the entire spectrum of automotive finance, from automated decision-making to fraud detection and business process improvement.

Responsibilities within this Role

• Lead data science product development, set standards, best practices, and innovation for the data science CoE (25%)
• Experimentation, build, integration of data science solutions into core business processes and new opportunities (75%)
Responsibilities will include:

• Definition and ongoing improvement of a machine learning environment 
• Develop and deploy AI models that impact business decisions 
• Establish best practices and governance routines to ensure adherence to model management policies, peer reviews, and compliance to our policy standards for privacy, ethics, and bias.
• Bring relevant data science techniques, algorithms, and tools to your team 
• Provide technical oversight, help and mentorship to the junior data scientists on the team 
• Apply suitable techniques for model testing and tuning, to assess accuracy, fit, validity, and robustness
• Innovate new ML methods in the data science space and drive change throughout the business 
• Contributes to code documentation, maintains playbooks, and provides timely progress updates
• Help generate compelling hypotheses to drive new business creation

Qualification requirements

Required Education:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Economics, Engineering, Operations Research or similar quantitative field
• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Economics, Engineering, Operations Research or similar quantitative field

Relevant Experience:

• 12+ years of data & analytics work experience with 8+ years in data science
• 7+ years in utilizing methods and tools to extract, curate, explore, and analyze data from large data sources
• 7+ years in developing, integrating and deploying machine learning solutions into the business decision making process
• 7+ years in leveraging algorithms, tune parameters and back testing validation
• 5+ years leading ML project development

Skills:

• Collaborate with product owners and product managers to translate business requirements into impactful AI solutions that scale
• Build, integrate and deploy machine learning solutions into the business decision-making process
• Thorough knowledge of machine learning models, including both traditional ML and GenAI
• Utilize a consultative approach to work with the business to solve challenging problems using various analytical techniques
• Embrace, research, explore, and enable new quantitative techniques and technologies in data science that will help define VWFS as an industry leader in the application of data science techniques

• Extensive experience with model evaluation and solid grasp of A/B testing and causal analysis
• Research new data sources and analytical tools, contribute to new application development, and data quality improvement efforts
• Ability to originate curiosity to collaborate with different business units to co-create solutions
• Passion for data analysis and problem solving
• Establishes and maintains effective performance tracking; identifies improvement opportunity, form hypothesis, propose, design and implement tests to drive strategy enhancement and optimization.
• Superior ability to communicate technical ideas and results to non-technical users in written and verbal form